So I wanted to take another stab at tacos last week and the very best thing I had on hand was some chicken thighs, which were fresh and very juicy (if that’s a word I can use with chicken thighs). And when it was all done, I actually really liked these chicken tacos and wanted to share them here in Discovery Cooking.

One of the great things about tacos is that almost anything goes in them (provided it has some Mexican flavors and loads of Chilis). Apart from that, almost anything else goes. The recipe below is how I did this little treat.

It also gives me a chance to do something else I’ve wanted to do for a couple of months, which is to explain what’s going on here at Discovery Cooking. Yes, I’ve moved to Cleveland, Ohio (well Sheffield Lake, anyway) and I’m really about a two-three block walk from the actual Lake Erie. And while that’s good, as is the fact I’m living by myself, which is interesting and occasionally something of a pain, it’s sort of changing the way I cook. I don’t generally have three or four people to cook for these days, and I’m still learning that part of the puzzle. So for now, I’ll probably be posting a little less as I reconfigure what I do here, and eventually, I’ll get back to a better posting schedule and I hope some new ideas. Time will tell.

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Chicken and waffles apparently is a thing that goes way back, although I came across it only recently. I still haven’t figured out whether it’s a big breakfast or an interesting dinner. Either way, I guess it combines wonderful fried chicken, waffles and in my case, a very tasty bourbon-maple syrup topping. Oh yeah — it’s also done sous vide — which makes it just superb, in my opinion.

So for those who aren’t familiar with sous vide (are there people like that still?) we start out with the chicken, cooked sous vide at about 150 degrees for about two hours. For this recipe, I boned the chicken (except for the legs) before cooking with just a little oil and garlic. When that’s done, I used some flour, eggs and breadcrumbs, then fried the chicken until the breadcrumbs were just the right color. Because all the chicken is cooked to 150 degrees and left long enough to kill off any bacteria, it’s fresh and very juicy.

While the recipe is cooking, I made the waffles, which are just the way the manufacturer says they should be, including a little buttermilk, then got to work on the bourbon and maple syrup mix, which is very easy but very flavorful.

While I made this for dinner, chicken and waffles could easily cut down the chicken and make it into a quick breakfast.

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Chicken breasts can make, among lots of other things, a nice salad. And while many like the light, easy salad that you see almost everywhere, there also is a “more robust” kind of salad that I tend to like. If you really want a meal with a nice one or two chicken breast plopped on top, this is what I had in mind when I decided to fix a nice salad dinner.

This whole dish is really rather easy to make. All it really requires is a sauce made up of butter, vinegar, honey and maybe a little soy sauce to give it a color and add a little to the flavor. You’ve all heard me talk about sous vide on many occasions. But I will never make a chicken breast any other way (unless I’m cooking a whole chicken). If you’ve never had a sous vide breast, you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t, I can’t begin to tell you how much of a difference it makes. Can you do this without? Yep. But if you can, get a sous vide. You’ll be glad you did.

Once the sauce is made, and the chicken is done, all you really need to do is toss the breasts on a quick grill (or some other kind of grilling machine) with a little bit of the sauce and pull together as much salad as you’d like. When the grilling is done, all you need to do is pour the rest of the sauce over the chicken and onto the salad underneath, and you’re done.

Note: By the way, this is the 501st post to this recipe site and while I had no idea we would ever get this far, it is gratifying to know that we’ve done fairly well as recipe blogs go. Much has happened since the first post a little over three years ago and there is much more to do. Stick around. I hope it gets even better.

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While the last days of summer are soon to be leaving us, we’ve still got a few days yet, and that’s where this recipe for chicken with onion gravy can be a real winner.

We’ve said it many times, but summer is, above all, about making meal prep easy as possible for much of the time, and whether you’ve got some left over chicken (or want to make some just for this recipe) the onion gravy is quick and easy. Add a little pasta and you’ve got a quick and easy meal. And folks, the best news is that this gravy is one of the best I’ve ever made.

No kidding. It takes maybe 10 minutes to prep and only 20 minutes to cook. The flavor is absolutely amazing.

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By now, you know that I’ve become a big fan of sous vide chicken finished up in a deep fryer. And that’s of course where these chicken legs come from. They’re done sous vide, at 150 degrees for about an hour or so, then — after they’ve cooled — they’re breaded and deep fried, with a little finishing salt on the side.

The main issue with these chicken legs is a breading mix, which uses flour, garam masala, a little parsley, and plenty of paprika. In this case, I use the breading mix first to coat the chicken, then add some mixed egg and then roll it back through the flour as a finish. The result is rather light and really perfect for a light dinner entry.

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How do you make your own empanadas? Well, I had some chorizo and some fresh chicken in the fridge, so the idea of making chicken chorizo empanadas seemed like something that just HAD to happen. And surprising enough, It actually did happen (although the first try wasn’t very good, but that’s an altogether different story). Turns out, none of it was very hard, and you could use a good frozen package of empanada shells to make it even easier, if you care to.

The story behind empanadas, on the other hand, was a revelation — at least to me. For a lot of reasons (not the least was my own ignorance of South of the Border cooking) I assumed that empanadas were Mexican. I mean, you get them everywhere in Mexican restaurants, right? Nope. These tasty little meat pies are originally from Argentina, it turns out, and while chicken and chorizo may (or may not) have been a part of the original pies, empanadas have become such a mainstay of all cooking below the U.S., I think they probably fit the norm now.

The trick is that whether they were part of the original idea, they are first, extremely good and second, well, why not?

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Root Beer is generally NOT something I’d typically apply to chicken wings, chicken or most anything else I can think of. But the truth is, these root beer chicken wings actually work — much better than I would have thought.

First of all, I started out with some chicken wings with some oil and a little salt, made sous vide, and ready to go. With nothing else in the chicken, I breaded them with some flour, egg and panko bread crumbs and cooked them in a deep fryer. From there, you can use any number of sauces, but this time I wanted to do the root beer sauce which began from a blogger friend, who offered up the idea. I was skeptical, of course, but with a great chicken base, what could go wrong, right?

For the sauce, I used root beer, ketchup, a little brown sugar, some honey, Worcestershire sauce a little lime and a bit of garlic and onion. You can taste the root beer in the sauce, but fortunately, it’s not the only or even the strongest flavor in the sauce. And on the chicken, it blends nicely and works very well. I wouldn’t have tried it without a friend’s suggestion, but yeah, it really does work.

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